Detection of MAC hardware identifier via wifi hotspot
mac-presence system is basically an attendance taker... can be used in a home, or office, or mall... etc. This type of Mac address logging and association / location tracking is common for wifi hot spot providers, etc. Most people have no idea... this system just lets me know who is home or not based on the presence of their mobile device.
Intrigued by this wifi-data-leaking stuff since I watched James Lyne's Ted talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/james_lyne_everyday_cybercrime_and_what_you_can_do_about_it?language=en) (the last demonstration near the end). I emailed him and asked what hardware and software he used. He replied with something like this for the hardware (which is what I have), and for the software it relies on my own python scripts, plus scapy (http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/) and airmon-ng (http://www.aircrack-ng.org/). Of interest is fact that there are far more technically savvy people around these days, but fewer and fewer that actually understand at a low level what is actually happening behind the scenes. Script kiddies vs engineers really.
Part of my motivation was generated by the backlash against "tracking" on the web through cookies as compared to the non-backlash (due to ignorance I believe) against much more pervasive privacy infringements resulting from app permissions and wifi data leakage - I wrote a bit about this here: https://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/targeted-online-advertisements-a-threat-to-personal-identity-and-security/.
Hardware Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2 Alfa-AWUS051NH USB wifi antennae - specifically this device: http://www.amazon.ca/Alfa-AWUS051NH-802-11a-Wireless-Network/dp/B003YH1X48
Software a Java GAE application, a GAE Cloud Endpoint restful API, a Python program and API client which runs a wifi packet sniffer and talks to the API, an Android mobile App which pulls from the API, and provides status updates servos which are controlled by python scripts and the data Linux OS, Raspberry Pi, hardware interfacing
Python script makes an http call to a restful API interface provided by the back end Google App Engine application - which is really just a one table data store with the following fields: id (mac address) , name (string), device type (string), last seen (datetime), home (boolean)
Commands to initialize
Use airmon-ng to to Alfa wifi in monitor mode: sudo airmon-ng start wlan0 Start the wifi hotspot: sudo airmon-ng start wlan0 Start the python script: sudo python wifiscan_threads.py mon0